Your Mind At Work by Jeanette Bronee

Jeanette Bronee is a keynote speaker and author whose mission to help companies and people cultivate self-care. Read the article below on how to be more mindful from Jeanette Bronee.

How do we create some mental space to think better?

When someone says, don't think about it, there's a good chance you struggle to let it go. And yet you might even find yourself still thinking about it in the middle of the night when you wake up. It might even still be on your mind while you are getting ready for your new day.

Perhaps you can relate to the churning machine inside your head that never sleeps called your mind.

The mind is always working. Even when you are asleep, your mind is sending all kinds of messages through the system; some are dreams that you can remember and others are simply so unconscious that you don't register them, until you suddenly have the solution to the problem you were stuck on.

Overwhelm and anxiety is often described as the feeling of not being able to "think straight" and the feeling that thoughts are competing for your attention. The myth that we can multitask is adding even more to this feeling, creating a feeling of chaos inside because our attention is constantly being hacked by other people's agendas. We might not even notice until the end of the day when we realized we didn't complete all that we set out to get done and we are exhausted.

It's easy to feel that we have to solve all the problems at the same time, however the key to reclaiming our attention is to choose and prioritize what comes first and how to respond based on what matters instead of just reacting to the urgent. It is essential for us to create the mental space for strategic thinking, not just putting out the fires of the daily challenges that land in our inbox.

The more we have on our plate, the more this can feel impossible, and stepping back to get an overview, before we lean back in, can seem like a luxury we cannot afford. However, that's where we get stuck. Trying to do it all, think about everything, and get lost in the complexity of it all, wishing for the hamster wheel in our mind to stop, only to find that the only time it does is when it breaks down.

So what do we need to empty our mind, become mindful and create change and transformation instead?

Maybe we don't need to empty our mind but rather learn to listen better so that we can choose how we use our attention.

For more insight on self-care and well-being at work, visit jeanettebronee.com.